Red Cross Officials to Discuss P.O.W.'s Still Alive in North Korea

SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 19 - More than half a century after the end of the Korean War, Red Cross officials of North and South Korea are to meet Tuesday to discuss the fate of about 1,000 prisoners of war and civilian abductees believed to be alive in North Korea.

The three-day meeting in the North Korean tourist enclave of Kumgangsan comes as the Koreas are oiling the rusted locks that have kept them divided for decades. In recent days, for the first time, North Korean officials paid their respects to the South Korean war dead and visited the South Korean Parliament. In coming days, South Koreans are to start crossing the demilitarized zone in buses to visit Kaesong, the North Korean city closest to Seoul. In October, trains are to start running from here to North Korea, restoring rail service ruptured during the 1950-1953 war.

After the end of the Korean War, North Korea tried to ease a labor shortage by secretly holding back thousands of South Korean prisoners of war, historians and escaped prisoners say. Until recently, the former soldiers, bent with age and hard labor in North Korean coal mines, were forgotten human footnotes in a deeply divided peninsula.

"We were hidden away -- I did not even know there was an exchange of P.O.W.'s," Jang Moo Hwan, a prisoner who escaped from North Korea in 1998, said in an interview at his apartment in Uljin, a coastal village a four-hour drive southeast of here. Now 79, he lives with his wife, Park Soon Nam, who had waited for him in South Korea since his capture in 1953.

"I never dared to say I wanted to send a letter to the South," he said of life in North Korea, a hard-line Communist nation. "I feared that I would be taken as a political dissident and starved to death."

The South Korean defense minister, Yoon Kwang Ung, has reported to the National Assembly that 542 South Korean prisoners of war are still alive in North Korea, cut off from virtually all contact with families and friends in the South. Separately, South Korea's government has said that during the past year, North Korea has seized 486 civilians from the South, largely fishermen.

During the past decade, 38 prisoners of war have escaped from the North. But, the issue rarely surfaces publicly here, partly because much of South Korea's media seeks to avoid antagonizing North Korea, and partly because the defectors shun publicity, fearing reprisals against wives and children left behind.

"I still feel like I am dreaming," Nam Tae Kyo, 75, said in January at a ceremony welcoming him back to his mountainous hometown, Juk Jang. On the edge of tears as he spoke in the town community center, he said he labored in underground coal mines, forbidden to even inform his family that he was still alive.

His escape through China in December had a happy ending, at a banquet with his family, who treated him like a Rip Van Winkle. In another success story, Jang Pan Seon, now 74, in July became the first known South Korean prisoner of war to escape through China with his entire family, six people.

Others have been caught in China and forcibly returned to North Korea.

Last January, China deported to North Korea a 72-year-old former South Korean soldier, Han Man Tack, who had been held in China for a month as an illegal alien. Believing that South Korean officials had not worked hard enough to protect him, members of Mr. Han's family traveled to Seoul and angrily returned one of his war medals to government officials.

Do Hee Yun, secretary general of the Coalition for Human Rights of North Korean Abductees and Refugees, said: "The South Korean government had officially notified China and requested his return, and yet they deported this man. I call this an inhumane act."

Veterans groups charge that until recently Seoul's government ignored the lost soldiers.

Seo Jong Gap, president of the Army Retired Colonels Association in South Korea, said in a telephone interview: "I am embarrassed that there was not once an official attempt to bring back the P.O.W.'s in half a century. The U.S. government goes to the ends of the earth to bring remains home. We should learn from this."

Since 1996, the United States has carried out annual search missions in North Korea, seeking remains of the 8,000 American soldiers still missing from the conflict. In May, as tension grew over the North's nuclear bomb program, the American military searchers withdrew and the search program was suspended.

South Korean diplomats and defense officials say that they work behind the scenes to win the soldiers' freedom. In mid-June, quiet diplomacy became public when North Korean officials unexpectedly agreed to discuss the issue in the open.

With a new round of nuclear talks expected to start in Beijing the week of Aug. 29, North Korea seems to be working to solidify South Korean support.

"The prospects for winning repatriation are low," Song Ki Hwan, a spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry, cautioned in an interview.

Mr. Do, the advocate for the abductees, called on China and North Korea to allow the former South Korean prisoners to return home. "Most of them are 80 years and over, and they might soon die of natural causes," he said. "They cannot wait any longer."

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 4 of the National edition with the headline: Red Cross Officials to Discuss P.O.W.'s Still Alive in North Korea. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe